Victoria Falls

“Victoria Falls is billed as one of the world’s greatest waterfalls,” a friend of ours once wrote, “but, as a matter of fact, it’s one of the world’s greatest anythings.” Mosi-oa-Tunya, “The Smoke That Roars,” isn’t the highest or the widest but it’s inarguably the world’s grandest and most booming waterfall, a large lakesworth of water flinging itself 360 feet straight down every minute of every day, right before our delighted eyes.

Our safaris usually give us a couple of days to appreciate the Falls’ subtly shifting moods. We enjoy coffee-sipping views from our room’s veranda of the almost 1,000 feet of mist that rise from the watery cauldron. We cruise on the Zambezi River, watching elephants and giraffes doing their daily work, and we helicopter over the Falls on the famed Flight of Angels, contemplating what the greatest travel writer of all time, Richard Halliburton, called “a hurricane of bursting water . . . that seems to fall up, not down.”

Scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.David LivingstoneThe first outsider to encounter Victoria Falls